One of my favorite baking tricks is easily accessible on grocery shelves: organic powdered sugar. Organic is the key here!
I like to support organic farming as much as possible but, to be perfectly honest, that’s not the reason I use organic powdered sugar in my gourmet cookies. It’s because of the starch combined with the finely-grained sugar to keep it from clumping. Regular powdered (or confectioners’) sugar uses corn starch while the majority of organic powdered sugar uses tapioca starch.
Corn starch has a lot of great uses in cooking and baking, but it does not have a great flavor. You may have noticed this yourself when using it to thicken gravy or a pie filling. The taste is strong but also bland and using too much can overpower the flavors you’re trying to highlight.
When it comes to frosting or icing, you use a copious amount of powdered sugar - often 3 to 4 cups for a standard recipe. And with a copious amount of powdered sugar, you’ll also be adding a copious amount of that non-clumping starch, and adding its flavor to your frosting as well.
But tapioca starch doesn’t have any competing flavor at all! When you use organic powdered sugar in your frosting, all you’ll get is pure sugar flavor and you’ll be able to notice the difference. Every frosting I make, whether it's cream cheese frosting or raspberry frosting, uses only organic powdered sugar.
Powdered sugar has another great use in baking, especially when you are trying to stuff as much butter into a cookie dough as it can take (as I do!) Powdered sugar can add stability to your cookie doughs, helping them keep their shape. If you are cutting out shapes for decorated cookies but your cookies are spreading more than you’d like, subbing out some of the regular granulated sugar for powdered sugar might keep those cookies from spreading into indistinguishable globs. And the organic powdered sugar will keep your cookie flavor pure.
I use powdered sugar to stabilize some of my other cookie recipes: I use them in my Golden Butter Cookies (which are also baked in rings to keep from spreading too much!) and also in my Peanut Butteryest Peanut Butter cookies. To achieve a strong, lush peanut butter flavor, my recipe requires a LOT of peanut butter - it’s the number one ingredient in those bad boys! But that also adds a lot of delicious fat, which contributes to spreading. Adding some powdered sugar keeps the Peanut Butteryest Peanut Butter cookies' shape round and beautiful while maintaining a powerful peanut butter flavor.
Next time you’ve got a batch of icing or sugar cookies to make, reach for the organic powdered sugar and check the ingredients to ensure it’s using tapioca starch. I promise you’ll thank me!
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